So winter is well and truely here in Australia and the winds are up in the highlands. At night they usually calm down so I thought I'd exploit this by building a cruisey night flyer from the HobbyKing J3 'EP Old Timer' ARF:



This is identical to the J3 'Green' I bought from them at the start of the year to learn on, and I enjoyed that very much as a trainer so figured itd be a good mount for night flying gear and perhaps as a future FPV plane given its stable flying.

The night gear I've ordered is also from HobbyKing and is simple a few bundles of LED strips that are designed to be run directly from unused channels on your receiver. A standard 6-channel 2.4ghz receiver will have three unused Futaba/JR sockets in a 4-channel aircraft (Batt/Bind, Gear, Auxillary) and four unused socket in a 3-channel plane so these little fellows are perfect:



I've ordered sets of green, red and white lights to fit to the wingtips and tail of the J3 so I can properly orient it at night and also have a somewhat scale appearance, rather than just drape it in glowtube or LED strings.

Powertrain for the J3 will be the same as the ultimate evolution of my first HobbyKing J3 - a 24g Hextronik 1500kv outrunner with 7x4 prop (GWS EP/DD 8x4 cut down) and 3-cell 1000mAh lipo pack. This setup gave me good thrust and decent speed for aerobatic maneuvers and I've no worries with using it again.

More as it happens, cheers - boingk